Upgrading to a no longer supported version

Question

As per my previous question the issue I hoped would be resolved persist. Issue is that by upgrade I get the option to upgrade to 13.10. However 12.10, which I'm currently running, ended in May of 2014 – the “supplied” version is 13.10, but this one ended in July of 2014!

What to do now? Really hoped I could, for once, do an upgrade and not, yet again, buy a new HDD for upgrade ... with the days of work that this entails :P

Should I upgrade to 13.10 and then to 14.10 or 14.04 or is this a dead end. Is it a high risk operation etc.?

Can't post image so here is an ASCII version of dialogue

[»«][                       Software Updater                      ] _X |
|                                                                      |
|  +-------+  Software updates are no longer provided for Ubuntu       |
|  |    ^  |  12.10                                                    |
|  |    #  |                                                           |
|  +-------+                                                           |
|             To stay secure, you should upgrade to Ubuntu 13.10       |
|                                                                      |
|  [ Settings... ]                    [  Upgrade...  ] [     OK     ]  |
|                                                                      |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

After [ Upgrade... ]:

= Upgrading to a no longer supported version =

You are about to upgrade to a version of Ubuntu that is no longer
supported. 

The target release of Ubuntu is '''no longer supported''' by
Canonical. The support timeframe is between 9 month and 5 years after
the initial release. You will not receive security updates or critical
bugfixes. See http://www.ubuntu.com/releaseendoflife for details.

It is still possible to upgrade this version and eventually you will
be able to upgrade to a supported release of Ubuntu.

Alternatively you may want to consider to reinstall the machine to the
latest version, for more information on this, visit:
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu

For pre-installed system you may want to contact the manufacturer
for instructions.

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score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 01 '14 at 19:32

Try changing your /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the old repositories.

Make a backup of sources:

sudo cp -v /etc/apt/sources.{list,backup}

Change sources.list

sudo sed -i 's/us.archive/old-releases/' /etc/apt/sources.list

Then run

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then run

sudo do-release-upgrade

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '14 at 19:42

For this particular case, the only quick, easy, less prone for upgrading issues, use less bandwidth and with support from the community and new updates is to do a backup of the files you need and then proceed on installing Ubuntu 14.04.1 from the LiveDVD or LiveUSB, removing everything you had before.

You will have your files backed up and will have a less time and with less issues the latest 14.04.1.

It would be a huge waste of effort to change the sources.list files to point to the old ones and start upgrading from 12.10 to a newer supported version. So your best secure and simple way is to install 14.04.1 directly from the Live medium and do the backup of any important files you need.

If you have created a /home partition, even better, simply tell the 14.04.1 installation that you will use the /home partition already existing as your /home for the 14.04.1 install. You can do this by selecting the Manual or Advanced way when it prompts for what to do with the existing Ubuntu installation (The window that says overwrite, remove old ubuntu and install new, etc..).

Upgrading to a no longer supported version

2 Answers2

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